“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the convictions of things not seen,” the Letter to the Hebrews tells us. I couldn’t help thinking of that today when I scanned the list of articles on Real Clear Politics.

A piece in Roll Call ponders which notes the discrepancy between the two possible versions of Barack Obama that could be elected: “After 22 months that he’s been campaigning, after thousands of speeches, dozens of debates and reams of position papers, it’s still not clear if he is a pragmatic post-partisan unifier or a populist liberal ideologue.” After a back-and-forth consideration of many questions and the possible sides Obama could take, the article ends: “Let’s hope he’s the man we hope he is.”

An article in the National Journal has a similar list of hopes and wonders, concluding that Obama “the liberal ideologue could be a political failure; the pragmatic reformer could be a great leader.”

Finally The Economist endorses Obama, noting that: “the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.”

I’m not so sure. I tend to think that a man’s voting record and remarks outside of a campaign are just as important, if not more so, than his conduct in a debate or in a convention hall. Furthermore, I have much less faith than these authors that a President Obama would rise above the party agenda he supports to attain a common ground he wouldn’t need.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the convictions of things not seen.” Maybe I’m too much of a pessimist, but I haven’t seen anything more solid than rhetoric–albeit the finest rhetoric America has seen in a long time–on which I can base a hope that is more than foolish, wishful optimism.

If he’s elected, I sure hope Sen. Obama’s the man many hope him to be. It’s just that the things I have seen keep getting in the way of any assurance or convictions of my own.

In honor of today’s holiday–Reformation Day–I have been rereading Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. A few of his theses, in particular, stood out this time around:

41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them preferable to other good works of love.

42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of mercy.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons;

44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more free from penalty.

45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God.

Striking is his emphasis on works of mercy and love, implicitly evoking the sheep and the goats of Matthew 25: “Truly, I say to you. As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

“Faith,” Luther wrote in his Introduction to Romans, “is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God.” Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the faithful man “freely, willingly, and joyfully does good to everyone, serves everyone, suffers all kinds of things, loves and praises the God who has shown him such grace.” True faith, in short, is alive in love.

For love, the Apostle John wrote and Luther certainly agreed, is our grateful and grace-filled response to the One who loved us first and called us to himself: “He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. . . . Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth” (1 John 2:6, 3:18).

On the door of the church in Wittenberg, Martin Luther proclaimed it well: “Love grows by works of love.”

Voting for Obama for sake of having a black president would be irresponsibly self-indulgent, but few would deny that there’s something moving in this story from Texas:

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country’s first black presidential nominee.

Read the rest here.

At least, that’s what a new research study is telling us:

Clocks spring ahead and fall back when adjusting in and out of daylight saving time. A study published on Wednesday finds that heart attack rates do the same.

The research, based on heart attacks in Sweden, concluded that the chance of a heart attack goes up during the first three weekdays after the springtime shift to daylight saving time, possibly because of sleep deprivation. . . .

During the shift to daylight saving time, women seemed more vulnerable to heart attacks than men. Men were more likely to be protected during the Monday in the autumn, the researchers said.

As if the fact that the rate of diabetes has doubled in the past ten years wasn’t enough to worry about.

Want to escape from election-mania without severe withdrawal symptoms? Start weaning yourself off the constant, intense coverage by checking out this appreciative retrospective on the presidency of George W. Bush.